Wednesday, 25 June 2008

Gaza City, Gaza - A crippling year-long siege has ground nearly all private economic activity here to a halt. Many ordinary Gazans have suffered under months of an Israeli blockade, but a few wealthy Palestinians have managed to maintain a spot of the good life.

.... "For 800 years, my family ruled this land,"
[another wealthy Gazan] says, puffing on a narghile at the seaside restaurant of the Ottoman-style al-Deira Hotel. For lunch, Mr. Gosh eats curried shrimp, and for dinner, fish imported from Israel.

However, unlike Khozendar, Mr. Gosh's Rolex, Ray Ban sunglasses, and tailor-made Italian clothing provide him no solace. Every day, for months, as far as he can remember, Gosh has come to the hotel restaurant with his wife, sat at the table where they were married nine months ago, and stared, mostly quietly, out to sea. Even for Gaza's rich, there is nowhere to go, he says.

"Suffering is all over the place," he says. "We have our streets dirty, our markets empty, our hospitals short of supplies."

"In the time of my father, things were much better," he continues, as though he were fated to preside over the last years of a crumbling dynasty. "In the time of my grandfather, things were better still. What have we done here for the past 60 years?"